One of the most exotic locales for “The Linguists” is in the jungles of India, where Harrison and Anderson tried to blend in with a tribe speaking the Sora language. Getting into the tribal lands is an adventure in itself, requiring special permission and official escorts.

It’s almost humorous to watch a couple of white guys singing and the dancing with the villagers – and drinking more palm wine than maybe they should. The scene turns a little scary at one point when the white guys have trouble figuring out just how much of a “gift” they should hand over to the tribe’s chieftain.

But once they get down to documenting the language, the linguists discover something that makes them forget all about the culture clash: It turns out that the Sora counting system blends two counting systems, base-12 and base-20. For example, the number 93 in our base-10 system is referred to as “four-twenty-twelve-one” in Sora.

“We should try to figure out what these different ways of knowing math are before they all get flattened out and vanish,” Harrison says in the film.